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<div>We are endowed by the Creator with power to live our lives for the well-being of all. Heaven and hell are about living (or not) in right relationship with all of creation, of honoring or dishonoring all, and knowing the love of God by sharing it with all of our relatives: human, plants, trees, four-legged, winged, water, and earth all woven together.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Heaven And Hell - Live and Let Die PC</div><div></div><div>DOWNLOAD: https://t.co/YPP9QaJUR5 </div><div></div><div></div><div>It is hardly surprising, then, that a belief in an afterlife should bean important part of the Christian tradition. Even if our lives doextend beyond the grave, however, the question remains concerning thenature of the future in store for us on the other side, and thevarious Christian views about heaven and hell are proposed answers tothis question. According to a relatively common view in the widerChristian culture, heaven and hell are essentially deservedcompensations for the kind of earthly lives we live. Good people go toheaven as a deserved reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go tohell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scalesof justice are sometimes thought to balance. But virtually allChristian theologians regard such a view, however common it may be inthe popular culture, as overly simplistic and unsophisticated; thebiblical perspective, as they see it, is far more subtly nuanced thanthat.</div><div></div><div></div><div>is fairly unspecific concerning the fate of the wicked and the importof separation from God. For if we think of such separation as a stateof being estranged or alienated from God, or if we think of it assimply the absence of a loving union with God, then (3) is equallyconsistent with many different conceptions of hell, some arguablymilder than others. It is equally consistent, for example, with theidea that hell is a realm where the wicked receive retribution in theform of everlasting torment, with the idea that they will simply beannihilated in the end, with the idea that they create their own hellby rejecting God, and with the idea that God will simply make them ascomfortable as possible in hell even as God graciously limits the harmthey can do to each other (see Stump 1986). This lack of specificityis by design. For however one understands the fate of those whosupposedly remain separated from God forever, such a fatewill entail something like (3). Alternatively, anyone who rejects (3)will likewise reject the idea of everlasting torment as well as any ofthe supposedly milder conceptions of an everlasting separation fromGod.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Although this Augustinian rationale for the justice of hell has had aprofound influence on the Western theological tradition, particularlyin the past, critics of Augustinian theology, both ancient andcontemporary, have raised a number of powerful objections to it.</div><div></div><div></div><div>But why suppose it even possible that a free creature should freelyreject forever the redemptive will of a perfectly loving andinfinitely resourceful God? In the relevant literature over the pastseveral decades, advocates of a free-will theodicy of hell haveoffered at least three quite different answers to this question:</div><div></div><div></div><div>In any case, how one assesses each of the three answers above willdepend upon how one understands the idea of moral freedom and the roleit plays, if any, in someone landing in either heaven or hell. Thefirst two answers also represent a fundamental disagreement concerningthe existence of free will in hell and perhaps even the nature of freewill itself. According to the first answer, the inhabitants of hellare those who have freely acquired a consistently evil will and anirreversibly bad moral character. So for the rest of eternity, theseinhabitants of hell do not even continue rejecting God freelyin any sense that requires the psychological possibility of choosingotherwise. But is such an irreversibly bad moral character evencoherent or metaphysically possible? Not according to the secondanswer, which implies that a morally perfect God would never ceaseproviding those in hell with opportunities for repentance andproviding these opportunities in contexts where such repentanceremains a genuine psychological possibility. All of which points onceagain to the need for a clearer understanding of the nature andpurpose of moral freedom. (See section 5.1 below for some additionalissues that arise in connection with freedom in heaven and hell.)</div><div></div><div></div><div>Rarely, if ever, are Christian theologians very specific about whatheaven will supposedly be like, and there are no doubt good reasonsfor this. For most of them would deny that the primary sources of theChristian faith, such as the Bible, provide much information on thisparticular matter. But three issues have typically arisen in therelevant philosophical literature: first, because so many of therecent Christian philosophers have focused upon free will theodiciesof hell, it is hardly surprising that the issue of freedom in heavenshould likewise have arisen; a second issue is whether the misery ofloved ones in hell would undermine the blessedness of those in heaven;and a third issue is whether immortality of any kind would ultimatelylead to tedium, boredom, and an insipid life.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Like the arguments over universalism and human freedom, as brieflysummarized in section 4.2 above, the issue of freedom in heaven onceagain illustrates the need for a reasonably clear and complete accountof free will. It also illustrates how easily a purely verbal dispute,which is an apparent dispute that arises from different uses of thesame term, can sometimes disguise itself as a genuine disagreementover some matter of substance. With respect to the issue of freedom inheaven, here are a couple of additional examples to consider: (a) thehonest banker whose deeply-rooted moral and religious convictions makeit psychologically impossible for him to accept a bribe in a givensituation, and (b) the mother whose great love for her newborn babymakes it psychologically impossible for her knowingly to harm herbeloved child physically. The question of whether there is freedom inheaven seems relevantly similar to the question of whether our honestbanker freely refuses the bribe and whether our loving motherfreely refuses to do anything she knows would harm her babyphysically.</div><div></div><div></div><div>This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When we originally scheduled the interview we're about to hear, we didn't realize how weirdly timely it would be. Let's face it - the pandemic has made death a presence on a scale most of us aren't used to. Your beliefs about what happens after death or if anything happens might shape how you're dealing with your fears and anxieties. In the new book, "Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife," my guest Bart Ehrman writes about where the ideas of heaven and hell came from. He examines the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, as well as writings from the Greek and Roman era.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>EHRMAN: Yeah, that would absolutely be good. It's not that I wish I believed it; I wish that it were true. And as I say in my book, as we'll probably get to, it may be true that we will live after we die. But if we do, it'll be something pleasant like that. It's not going to be something awful. So I - you know, it's not that I wish I believed it so much as I wish that it were true.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Either we live on and we see those we knew before and those we didn't know before, and we spend all of our time being with them, which for him was absolute paradise because Socrates liked nothing better than conversing with people, and so now he could converse with Homer and with all the greats of the Greek past. So that would be great. And if it's not that, he said it would be like a deep sleep. Everybody loves a deep, dreamless sleep. Nobody frets about it or gets upset by having it. And so that's the alternative. And so it's either a deep sleep, or it's a good outcome, and either way it's going to be fine. And that's exactly what I think.</div><div></div><div></div><div>GROSS: One of the theses of your book about the history of heaven and how is that views of heaven and hell don't go back to the earliest stages of Christianity, and they're not in the Old Testament or in Jesus' teachings. They're not?</div><div></div><div></div><div>EHRMAN: (Laughter) I know, exactly. This is the big surprise of the book, and it's the one thing people probably wouldn't expect because, you know, when I was growing up, I just assumed. This is the view of Christianity. So this must be what Jesus taught. This is what the Old Testament taught. And in fact, it's not right. Our view that you die and your soul goes to heaven or hell is not found anywhere in the Old Testament, and it's not what Jesus preached. I have to show that in my book, and I lay it out and explain why it's absolutely not the case that Jesus believed you died and your soul went to heaven or hell. Jesus had a completely different understanding that people today don't have.</div><div></div><div></div><div>GROSS: Are there things in the Hebrew Bible that still support the idea of heaven and hell as people came to understand it, things that you can extract from the Old Testament that might not literally mention heaven and hell but still support the vision that emerged of it?</div><div></div><div></div><div>EHRMAN: I think one of the hardest things for people to get their minds around is that ancient Israelites and then Jews and then Jesus himself and his followers have a very different understanding of what the relationship between what we call body and soul. Our view is that we - you've got two things going on in the human parts. So you have your body, your physical being, and you have your soul, this invisible part of you that lives on after death, that you can separate the two and they can exist - the soul can exist outside of the body. That is not a view that was held by ancient Israelites and then Jews, and it's not even taught in the Old Testament.</div><div></div><div></div><div>In the Old Testament, what we would call the soul is really more like what we would call the breath. When God creates Adam, he creates him out of earth, and then he breathes life into him. The life is in the breath. When the breath leaves the body, the body no longer lives, but the breath doesn't exist. We agree with this. I mean, when you die, you stop breathing. Your breath doesn't go anywhere. And that was the ancient understanding, the ancient Hebrew understanding of the soul, is that it didn't go anywhere because it was simply the thing that made the body alive.</div><div></div><div> dd2b598166</div>
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